Posted
by
Roblimo
on Wednesday April 11, 2001 @12:00PM
from the letting-down-what-hair-he-has-left dept.

Bob Young prefaces his answers to your questions by saying,
"You may notice I've ducked some of the answers below - there
is a reason for this.
My role at Red Hat these days is as Chairman of the board.
Matthew Szulik is Red Hat's CEO and will be a better person to answer
some of the specific issues that these questions raise....

"I have been spending more of my time recently working with Laurie Racine
and her team at the Center for the Public Domain, www.centerpd.org.
The Center's goal is to help improve the quality of the debate on
Intellectual Property issues in the public arena. Our support of
ibiblio.org (formerly Sunsite and Metalab) is just one example of the
kinds of things we are doing to improve the ecosystem that makes up
open source in specific and the public domain of knowledge generally.

"My answers will not be "official" Red Hat policy (that would be
Matthew's job), or even the Center's official positions, but rather my
personal take on the answers to your questions."

------------

Do you think a recession will help RedHat/Linux?
by donturn

Bob,

We had an Ask Slashdot a few days ago wondering whether a
recession will help Linux or not. Since you're the CEO of
RedHat, you
probably have a better idea as to what effect a recession
will have on RedHat and Linux. So, do you think you will
gain more market
share during a recession than you would otherwise?

Bob:

As above, I haven't been CEO of Red Hat for quite a while now (which
is why Red Hat Inc is doing so well - but that's another story ;-)
but here's my take on that question:

Back in the early days of Red Hat we used to sit around debating how
we were going to get MIS directors to take us seriously, when one of
our directors, Frank Batten Jr (now involved with open source database
company Great Bridge) would insist that we shouldn't be trying to
sell the MIS directors at all. He insisted we should focus our sales
efforts on the CFOs (Chief Financial Officers).

His logic was simply that the open source price/performance ratio was simply
so much better than the proprietary software vendors that the CFO's
would eventually override the MIS dept's preference for the safe, tried and
true, binary-only proprietary software model they were used to, and
require that they consider open source alternatives.

In a strong economy the CFOs were willing to fund the MIS directors
budgets. In a slowing economy CFO's start to scrutinize every
expense much more carefully. The existence of the lower cost
open source alternatives are going to be very attractive to many companies
who are currently paying millions of dollars of royalties to software
upgrades they really would rather not have to purchase.

Who decides what goes in and how?
by Can

I'd like some insight on how the decision is made to include
something in Red Hat Linux, how quickly to roll in new
releases of software,
etc.

For example, I've seen pre-releases of KDE get included and
updated in rawhide (and I believe in actual Red Hat
releases) rather
often, but even the individual GNOME components are almost
never updated until well after a full stable release is
announced. There
are other examples, but that's the main one that comes to
mind.

There also still seems to be a lot of 0.x version software
in Red Hat to this day. So, I'm just curious how you make
these technical
decisions.

Bob:

There is no one method. It varies depending on which component of Red
Hat Linux is involved, and what the development community around that
component's advice to us is. Ask Slashdot to arrange an interview with
one of our engineering leaders and you'll get better answers than I can
give.

But... "There also still seems to be a lot of 0.x version software in
Red Hat to this day"
.. is a -much- smaller issue than it used to be. It was only a few years
ago that we used to ship beta code as part of our official releases simply
because there were so few alternatives.

Today the primary reason we ship any beta code is so that the community
of users who rely on Red Hat get more insight into where our
technology is going and more opportunity to help influence what it
does, how it does it, and how reliable future releases will be. Keep in
mind that a big percentage of Red Hat users and developers still, to
this day, do not have reliable high speed access and rely on CD-Roms
as the source of the sources.

Would you really recommend it for desktop use?
by update()

I'm a Linux enthusiast and contributor but I still don't see
where it's "ready for the desktop" as I would understand
that phrase.

Bob, if you had a non-technical friend or relative who
currently uses Windows, Quicken, Office, IE and AOL, could
you in good
conscience tell him it would be in his best interest to use
Linux instead? What exactly would be in it for him?

Bob:

Er, -I- am that non-technical friend, and I use a Red Hat Linux-based
desktop exclusively.

The real answer to your question goes like this: No one (other than
maybe some Slashdot reader) buys operating systems. People buy
applications and then chose the operating system that best runs those
applications. If you need to do desktop publishing you may go into a
CompUSA store, find a copy of Aldus Pagemaker and then read on the
side of the box that it runs on Windows or MacOS so you buy a computer with one
of those OSes to run your app.

If you work as I do: on the net (Netscape) including all the
net-based apps that I can run from my browser, reading email (exmh), and
printing the occasional Word file (Applixware), you can do all these
things on a Linux box every bit as easily and a great deal more
reliably than on any of the 1980s legacy OSes. On the other hand if
you need some application that only runs on Windows you may have
problems with a Linux-only computer.

Fortunately, the future of the desktop is not in the 1980s applications
that required you to load the application yourself, run it, back it up,
and otherwise play sys-admin to your own computer. The future of the
desktop will be using Internet appliances where the applications will
sit out on the net (or your corporate Intranet) and you just download
the small pieces that allow you to use those applications without
having to take responsibility for them. Your sys-admin will not have
to walk down the hall to have hands-on access to your machine. He or
she may be in Australia and will support your machine remotely.
This model requires a "real" operating system and will spell the end to
a lot of the OS lock-in that all the Windows 95 and 98-based apps on the
shelves of CompUSA represent.

Why invest in RedHat?
by Merk

RedHat has the biggest name recognition of all the Linux
distributions. To many non-tech types Linux == RedHat. And
you are now
breaking even, yet despite that RedHat's stock went from $80
a share to less than $5 and there doesn't seem to be a sign
of that turning
around.

What do you say to people who ask why they should invest in
RedHat? Also, as a high-tech company I'm sure employees got
stock
options, how are they dealing with the crash in share prices
and how do you convince them their options are still worth
something?

Bob:

As I've been preaching to anyone who would listen since long before
Red Hat went public, Red Hat is a good investment if you believe
that the proprietary binary-only software model as practiced by most
of the software industry today is broken.

It is broken in that it does not conform to what customers expect
from suppliers in free-market democracies, namely that the customer
is normally in control of the customer-vendor relationship. It is
only in the software industry, as this industry has evolved over the
last thirty years, where the vendor is in control of his customers
in an almost feudal way.

In the middle ages the feudal system was based on the ruling classes
keeping the population under absolute control by not giving them any
insight into the laws they were governed under. In effect you could
be thrown into jail for breaking a law, and the policing authority did
not have to tell you what law you broke or why it was in place.

Software users today are prohibited from making any changes to the
software that they are building their organizations around, whether to
add features their users desperately need, or stop their servers from
crashing unexpectedly, or to patch a security hole, completely
arbitrarily. In fact they can be thrown in jail for improving the
systems they are using. If you don't believe me just read any
shrink-wrapped proprietary software license.

Changing this industry is not going to happen overnight. So buying a
portfolio of open source companies stocks, including Red
Hat, may not pay off in the short term, or it might -- I'm not an expert
on the stock market. But open source is solving a major structural
problem in the software industry on behalf of the consumers of the
products of that industry. The companies who enable this change to
occur on behalf of their customers are going to be good investments
in the long term.

Your impressions on the recent MS Interview
by Amoeba

[Earlier] on Slashdot we got responses from an interview of
MS exec Doug Miller and he touched upon some areas of Linux
that
caused a lot of debate and discussion in the forum. My
question to you is, would you skim through Doug's reponses
and provide us
with your counterarguments or comments?

Bob:

Doug Miller and I go way back. All I can say is how disappointed I
am that Doug has joined the "dark side". He is a really decent human
being.

He used to provide the exact opposite answers to the ones he provided
in that interview and he did so with much more conviction.

(Sorry Doug.)

Also see 9 below.

Mandrake
by Xenex

Linux-Mandrake started off simply as basically a copy of Red
Hat Linux with KDE installed (which was the most advanced
desktop
environment at that time). However since 'growing' from Red
Hat, it has become a distibution of it's own, with a
incredibly simple
install, more features/applications (ReiserFS, more
intergrated Gnome/KDE menu...), Pentium optimised
applications, and generally is
more 'bleeding edge'.

How do you feel about the fact that Red Hat Linux was 'the
womb' of what would now have to be considered one of the
strongest Linux
distros for the desktop, and a major competitior to Red Hat
on the desktop with it's claimed "99% Red Hat
compatibility"?

Bob:

Mandrake is a great example of why open source is so valuable for the
user of software.

The software using marketplace is not a simple single market. It is
a vast collection of markets. Software developers who need good C and
Java compilers are as different from dentists who need good dental
office billing systems as two markets can get.

If Mandrake do their job properly they will serve some market(s)
better than Red Hat does.

So for all those potential Linux-users who might not use Red Hat
Linux because it does not include some application that they need, or
support in a language Red Hat does not offer, we can point them to Mandrake.

The result is more choice in the marketplace.
The customer wins, which is the whole point.

Security
by Rupert

Recently we've seen several worms attacking vulnerabilities
in the default install of Red Hat Linux. What is being done
to make the
default installation more newbie-friendly from a security
point of view? The average desktop user probably doesn't
want or need BIND,
do they?

Bob:

I have to duck this one. Security deserves precise and detailed answers
and I'm not qualified to give them.

With MacOSX arriving as a desktop Unix (more or less) backed
by a known, (sometimes) respected name, do you consider
Apple to be
a serious competitor, the same as Microsoft? Would Red Hat
ever consider a PPC release to try and steer people away
from MacOSX?
Or, instead, do you think Apple will remain largely a niche
player, but one that adds weight to the all-purpose
viability of Unix?

Bob:

"Apple will remain largely a niche
player, but one that adds weight to the all-purpose
viability of Unix."

This is -exactly- what I think. Go to the head of the class.

Standardization
by milo_Gwalthny

Bob -

Doug Miller, a Microsoft executive, was recently interviewed
for Slashdot. Many of the questions posed were regarding the
competitiveness of Linux with Windows in the medium-term. To
paraphrase, Doug said that there was no viable business
model based on
Linux, that the lack of standardization (ie. KDE v. Gnome)
would be enough of an economic disincentive to commercial
application
developers to prevent them from venturing into the market.

On the face of it, he seems to have a point. What do you
think? Does Linux need to be herded down the path towards a
super-majority
recognized 'standard' to be successful, or can the type of
open-source movement to date provide enough tools and
applications to drive
Linux to dominance?

Bob:

Saying that there is no business model to open source is like saying
there is no business model to democracy.

Miller's arguments are red herrings thrown to distract the debate from the
real issues.
The real issue is not standards or technical compatibility with specific
pieces of binary-only software. In an open source world compatibility is
not dependent on whether a binary-only supplier adopts the standard as
written or not. Whoever is trying to achieve compatibility simply
has to check the sources. So the games that the binary-only proprietary
software vendors play with standards go away. The real issue is where
are the innovations of the next generation going to come from. The
Millers of this world think that their employers should have
preferential rights on offering those innovations.

This control over future innovation is being assisted by the
trend in our legislatures worldwide to expand Intellectual
Property (patents and copyrights, otherwise known as government
granted monopolies) rights. These enable corporations to maximize
their profits at the expense of the citizens in our society and are
not just bad for our democracy, it is bad for business.

Let me be clear: Intellectual Property rights (IP) such as patents and
copyrights are good things. But like anything in life too much of a good
thing no longer is good. Too little vitamin D and you get bone diseases.
Too much vitamin D will kill you. IP can be useful to independent
inventors to protect their invention from being copied and marketed by
larger distributors without compensation to the inventor. But today
IP is mostly used by the armies of lawyers employed by the largest
technology and publishing companies to squash potential competitors
who don't have access to equivalent legal resources.

Just one example: For the first hundred years of copyright, copyright
terms lasted less than 20 years. In the last 40 years copyright has been
extended to 70 years plus the lifetime of the author. How government
granted monopolies, justified as a means for providing incentive to
authors to create additional works, achieves that goal *70 years after the
author's death* mystifies me.

Needless to say this change in the structure of the rules that govern
our society was not promoted by authors. It was promoted by the
people who truly benefit from the extended IP rules, namely the
publishers. Why we as a society are so keen to reward global publishing
companies at the expense of the authors, musicians, researchers,
artists, software developers, inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs
is another mystery.

All of these groups, in fact our society in general relies
on the public access to knowledge. For every Metallica who worries that
they will not be well enough paid for their next album there are
literally hundreds of thousands of musicians whose ability to create
and perform is being gradually eroded by the additional IP rules being
imposed on us by our elected officials in the name of supporting the
technology and publishing industries.

Giving the major global publishing and technology companies
ever-greater government granted monopolies on vast definitions of
technology (think "one-click" patents on a website) is inconsistent
with how free-market democracies are supposed to work. Then arguing,
as Miller does, that any alternative model cannot be legitimate
because it does not generate the monopoly profits his employer
collects would be a joke - if were not for so many of our legislators
buying this line of reasoning.

I don't want to discourage you from writing to your representative, or
your member of parliament, they need to hear from you. But here's a more
positive thought on this topic:
The cool thing about free-market democracies is that the citizens are
the consumers. So you can sometimes solve societal problems in the
marketplace. This is where Red Hat's and the rest of the open source
suppliers opportunity lies.

Linux and open source is succeeding simply because
it works in the customers interest better than the proprietary
binary-only model does. It gets around the innovation deadening
impact of software patents. It avoids the creativity sapping effect
of locking up knowledge and expression behind 70 year copyrights.

While open source may not be a business model any more than democracy
is a business model, it is possible to use open source to serve your
customers better than the competition. Matthew Szulik and his
team have driven Red Hat from revenues of less than $15 million when
we went public 21 months ago, to over $100 million today with
gross margins in excess of 55%.

On one thing Doug Miller and I agree: serving your customers is how you
build great companies. I just don't see how locking your customers into
inflexible binary-only proprietary technologies over which they have
no control can be defined as serving them. I guess we still have some work
to do getting the word out that there is a more robust, reliable and
economic way to use technology, it's called open source.

Red Hat Acquisitions
by Kostya

I noticed that while Red Hat was valued highly, Red Hat used
its funding to purchase companies like Cygnus and C2Net.
Escpecially
with the purchase of Cygnus, you appear to be consildating
the infrastructure that makes linux viable commercially. One
could
conjecture that you are trying to provide developer tools
and resources, both as a product and as a way to build into
Linux (as in the
motto "it is the developers/ISVs stupid!"). Red Hat is
currently valued much lower than it was at the top of the
hype, but one could argue
that these (and other) strategic acquisitions give Red Hat
an edge over the competition or the chance at surviving the
tech stock
maelstrom.

Q: How do you see these acquisitions as helping Red Hat and
its position in the market?

Bob:

In general the answer to the above is: yes. As in, yes we see the
need to offer comprehensive and high quality development tools as
extremely important to the future of the platform we are promoting.

The only point to be clear on is who we see as competition. Red Hat's
success to date has been due to our focus on the real competition.
When we started the whole Linux/open source market was not big enough
to pay our credit card bills, much less the rent.

So we new we had to take customers from the established industry
leaders. We knew we could do this by delivering benefits that those
billion dollar competitors were not willing to offer their customers.

This benefit was the control over the technology we were asking them
to invest in, that open source enabled us to deliver.

Which is why we don't see Mandrake as the competition. We have
products and services we can sell to a Mandrake user. The same is
not true of the big binary-only proprietary software suppliers.

Hardware support
by wowbagger

Unfortunately, most hardware vendors support Microsoft
because MS has the largest share of the market and they know
it will pay to
support MS with drivers.

Linux is not in that state, save for (perhaps) networking
devices. Has RedHat considered helping to fund driver
development for other
forms of hardware? I'm thinking mostly of 3D accelerated
video cards (by helping to fund the DRI group), but other
items (scanners,
USB- IDE interfaces, etc.) would be nice too.

Bob:

Yup, this has historically been a problem. Red Hat (and many of the
other leading Linux distributors) has contributed drivers, and
has contributed development resources to other device driver developers.

But more and more manufacturers recognize that they will sell more of their
boards, add-ons, peripherals, and systems if they make the small effort of
ensuring that it will run the latest Linux kernel and libraries.
For example HP is now actively writing open source Linux printer drivers for
the popular HP printers.